British engineers inferiority complex - hard to fathom that...

It seems ironic that those who are the most directly responsible for the advance a civilization's standard of living can hold such a mediocre social status. It’s understandable that British engineers in the early days of the profession were looked down upon by those educated in universities like Cambridge, Oxford, and the like since engineers weren’t formally educated. Hence they couldn’t be considered true “Professionals.” Engineers were only a step or two above the artisans their profession or trade as some might have called it, had come from. After all, up until the mid 19 th century an engineer was trained through apprenticeship rather than schooling. Another point I found interesting was some of the resistance to engineers with formal technical educations came from practicing engineers themselves. They found it

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Unformatted text preview: hard to fathom that someone with a head full of theory and little-to-no practical experience could build something that is more effective at accomplishing its intended task than something built by one who went through the traditional training regimen. While it’s true that experience trumps formal training in many situations, on my robotics team in high school I’ve seen more interesting, and in some cases, more effective out-of-the-box ideas come from those that had almost no experience in the competitions we participated in than those who had been with the team for three, even all four years. If some of these kids had been trained engineers with the same amount of experience there’s no telling what they would have come up with....
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